Education reporter

A husband and wife who have written books on a pair of famous walks across America are scheduled to appear at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia this evening.

James Hunt, a retired professor of history at Whitworth University in Spokane, Wash., wrote “Restless Fires,” an account of iconic environmentalist John Muir’s thousand-mile walk from Louisville, Ky. to the Gulf of Mexico.

Young Muir’s walk two years after the Civil War took him through Athens, but more importantly, helped shape his views about how humans fit into nature, Hunt maintains in “Restless Fires,” now out in paperback from Mercer University Press.

Later in his life, Muir played an important role in beginning the United States’ network of national parks and founded the Sierra Club, one of the country’s most important environmental organizations.

Linda Lawrence Hunt wrote about another walk in “Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America.”Published by Random House in 2003, “Bold Spirit” recounts the inspiring, yet sad story of a Norwegian immigrant mother Helga Estby, who set out from Spokane, Wash., with her teenage daughter in 1896 to walk across the country. They were trying to win a $10,000 wager to save the family farm, explains Hunt, who discovered the story while working as an English professor at Whitworth University.

They took $5, a revolver, and not a lot else, working their way across 14 states to New York City. But they never collected the bet, the farm was lost, and two of Estby’s other children died while she and her daughter were gone. Many, including family members, came to see the walk as a betrayal, not a triumph.

The two authors will talk about their books this evening in what is billed as the State Botanical Garden’s first Conservation Lecture.

The event begins at 6:30 p.m. with wine tasting, followed about an hour later with the Hunts’ talks on their books and on conservation. Cost is $5.

The Hunts are also cofounders of the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship.

They began the foundation in 1999 to honor the life of daughter Krista Kimberly Hunt Ausland, killed in a bus accident while she was volunteering in Bolivia.

The foundation’s goal is to perpetuate Krista’s ideals of Christian service.